The impact of the Canadian wildfires on the air in New York and Chicago, among many other places, shows how interdependent the world environment is. The air we breathe is the same air that circulates everywhere in the world. The proof of the chaos theory’s “Butterfly Effect” is all around us. Indeed, what happens in Africa and Latin America has an impact on the U.S. environment and vice versa.
As scientists around the world research the causes and affects of climate change, industries are taking the lead in mitigating the most generally accepted causes including carbon in various forms. As governments of all political persuasions debate the need to reduce CO2 (carbon dioxide), for example, laboratories and industries are moving rapidly to find and implement ways to reduce this element.
But because the air covers all the earth, one nation’s work can be degraded by another country’s lack of effort. Meeting the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement will require ambitious climate action this decade. Difficult questions remain as to how warming can be limited, accepting the technical realities of today, while respecting the different responsibilities and capabilities of all nations, those on the technical leading edge and those just starting on the way to a sustainable future.
Meeting this challenge requires substantial emissions reductions to reach net-zero emissions globally. In current policy debates, concerns about the political feasibility and fairness of the current generation of climate mitigation approaches are raised. Among the new options being studied is engineered CDR (carbon dioxide removal) including DACCS (direct air carbon capture and storage). DACCS is a potentially promising technology to help bridge this gap by passing ambient air over chemical solvents, which can be considered a form of CDR if the captured carbon is stored permanently underground.
But whether these technologies can help make ambitious goals more attainable, or whether they can help reach them more equitably remains an open question. In a study recently published in Environmental Research Letters, an interdisciplinary research group, led by International IIASA (Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) scientists, developed new scenarios exploring fairness and feasibility in deep mitigation pathways, including novel CDR technologies.
For the first time, the team implemented DACCS in a well-established integrated assessment model called MESSAGEix-GLOBIOM, and studied how this technology could impact global mitigation pathways under different scenarios of environmental policy effectiveness based on country-level governance.
The researchers emphasize that the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C does not change when considering various forms of CDR. The research team investigated how novel CDR interacts under different assumptions of technology and economic progress and the evolution of regional institutional capacity. The researchers highlighted the risks of dependency on unproven carbon removal while also discussing the role similar technologies could play in the future for developing countries. The study suggests that substantially improving institutional capacity to implement environmental policies, regulations, and legislation is critical to keep warming below 2°C if new forms of CDR fail to emerge in the near future.
The authors point out that, when accounting for the possible future evolution of CDR technologies combined with inherent risks, the fairness of overall outcomes did not meaningfully improve. DACCS did not impact near-term global mitigation ambitions and additional carbon removal in developed economies accounted for only a small component of the mitigation necessary to achieve stringent climate targets. This is because the removal of carbon dioxide by mid-century in these areas does not compensate sufficiently for their historical emissions.
The inability of DACCS to enhance the fairness of outcomes, like cumulative carbon emissions, in 1.5°C scenarios, emphasizes the notion that meeting global climate targets is a global effort requiring an “all-of-the-above” mitigation strategy. There is no room for flexibility when it comes to reaching climate goals.
The results, however, do show that engineered removal can play a role in making the post-peak temperature stabilization (or decline) phase more equitable. This means that the full timeframe under which accounting takes place is critical for exploring fair outcomes that are agreeable by most Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
To better attain the results needed, tools are being employed at various levels to define, analyze, and assess the carbon in the environment. After all, it is accepted that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” In the infrastructure construction business, Bentley Systems is well known for their digital twin products based on the iTwin Platform. The company announced the availability of a new carbon assessment capability in iTwin Experience to enable infrastructure professionals to seamlessly quantify carbon reduction opportunities in their projects.
With the new capabilities, infrastructure contractors can fully automate embodied carbon calculation reports and impact analyses, enabling them to explore multiple design choices faster and eliminate manual data exports and normalization. iTwin Experience provides a ready-to-go, bi-directional integration with EC3, enabling carbon assessments to be visualized in a digital twin without the need to write code. The EC3 (embodied carbon in construction calculator) was developed by the nonprofit Building Transparency. EC3 is a no-cost, open-access tool that allows benchmarking, assessment, and reductions in embodied carbon, focused on the upfront supply chain emissions of construction materials.
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